Here's an excerpt from the editorial, read it all here:
Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who serves his party in the U.S. Senate as caucus chairman, is one of the GOP’s many master messengers of the slick and entirely untrue propaganda about the Affordable Care Act that the right wing keeps hawking in an attempt to defeat President Obama in the 2012 election.
Consider his statement last week that rising health care premiums in the past year somehow prove that the promised benefits of the health care reform act just aren’t working. He said he told President Obama at the health care summit last year that “his bill would raise individual premiums.” Today, the senator asserted, “individual premiums are increasing, taxes are going up, and Medicare is getting cut.”
Snip:
Health care premiums are increasing, but not because the Affordable Care Act has been adopted. Rather, it’s because the ACA’s most essential levers to control health care spending, due to monolithic Republican opposition, won’t be implemented until the full bill takes effect in 2014. So today, health insurance companies are still able to raise premiums as high and as fast as they did in the bad old days before Congress — make that, the Democratic Party — had enough votes to assemble the health care reform initiative.
Perhaps worse than their run-up in profits, insurers are still denying coverage to a huge percentage of Americans who try to buy individual coverage policies. BlueCross BlueShield, Tennessee’s largest insurer with 63 percent of the market, had a denial rate of 34 percent, according to a recent posting on a new government Web site.
2 comments:
Good catch. Thanks
Open the ability to seell polcies acorss state lines and prices will go down. Georgia has one of the most expensive rates in the country and we who live 25 miles from the Alabama line (and lower rates) would have to move there in order to purchase a policy. Gubmint bought and sold.
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